Sony is set to buy out Bertelsmann’s share of their joint venture in music, Sony BMG. Sony will pay nearly $1 billion for Bertelsmann’s 50 percent share to become the sole owner of the record label group.
Sony BMG will drop the BMG from its name but continue its operations with no specific changes planned. The new Sony Music Entertainment will include the Columbia, Epic, Legacy, Arista, and Jive labels, among many others.
Sony and Bertelsmann formed Sony BMG in 2004.
Sony BMG: http://www.sonybmg.com.
(2008-08-05)
Rick Springfield’s biggest hits came after his original stint on General Hospital. He’s hoping history repeats itself to make his new album Venus in Overdrive a hit.
Alice Cooper’s new album Along Came a Spider is a concept album that enthusiastic fans have been comparing to his first concept album, Alice Cooper Goes to Hell.
John Fogerty’s June 24 Revival Tour concert at Royal Albert Hall was recorded for a holiday-season CD release.
Lindsey Buckingham’s new single is “Did You Miss Me.” A 10-song album, Gift of Screws, will follow in September.
Billy Joel played the last concert at Shea Stadium July 18. It was the same stadium where the Beatles invented the stadium rock concert in 1965, shortly after the stadium opened in 1964, and Paul McCartney flew in at the last minute to add a few late-night songs to the concert. Shea Stadium is being torn down as a new baseball stadium is being built.
Two days later Paul was in Quebec with his band to celebrate that city’s 400th birthday with a huge free concert. Organizers had planned for 50,000 people and had to set up video screens around town when over 250,000 showed up.
OpenOffice.org 3.0 is a small step forward for most users, but a whole new world for Mac users. The industry-leading office suite is now Mac-native, no longer relying on the Unix-like X11 interface. And it’s still free.
Paul McCartney: http://www.paulmccartney.com; Billy Joel: http://www.billyjoel.com; Lindsey Buckingham: http://www.lindseybuckingham.com; Alice Cooper: http://www.alicecooper.com; Rick Springfield: http://www.rickspringfield.com; OpenOffice.org: http://www.openoffice.org.
(2008-08-01)
Cuil is today’s new search engine. It is pronounced “kool” and looks cool but is not quite ready for the public.
Cuil shows magazine-style results, with columns and embedded picture thumbnails, and it claims to have a more complete database of web pages than Google. Unfortunately, common search terms are missing from its database, and the photos displayed are often irrelevant.
Cuil suggested, for example, that “Run-D.M.C.” is “a very rare” term or perhaps misspelled.
Cuil’s glitches are no more serious than those found in other popular search engines when they first launched, so we expect Cuil to turn into something useful in a matter of months. In the meantime, Cuil can be used as a cool new game, as you try to find the most comically irrelevant photo in a Cuil search result. For example, next to the entry for the official web site of the rock band Rush, Cuil showed a photo of the “Welcome to Palisades Interstate Parkway” sign. Can you top that?
Cuil: http://www.cuil.com.
(2008-07-28)
Mamma Mia! set a new record for the opening of a movie musical, grossing $27.6 million in its U.S. opening weekend.
The soundtrack album, featuring 17 Abba songs (a few more appear in the movie), made a splash, hitting #1 in the U.K. charts and #7 in the U.S. in its release week. This is a better debut than any Abba album.
At the same time, the Abba Gold compilation reached its highest chart position ever. Gold contains the Abba recordings of all but four of the songs in the movie soundtrack, along with a few others. Gold is #6 in the Billboard Pop Catalog chart and #5 on the U.K. album chart.
At least three other Abba-related albums are hot again this week: the similar Abba compilation, Number Ones, the longer compilation The Definitive Collection, and the 1999 London cast recording of Mamma Mia!
(2008-07-22)
As part of the cutbacks that see Starbucks closing 600 U.S. stores, the coffee giant will also be shuttering its record company, Hear Music.
The record label was an impressive success for Starbucks, with well-targeted marketing for albums by big names such as Sergio Mendes, Carly Simon, Paul McCartney, and most recently John Mellencamp. In all, Starbucks has been selling more than 4 million music CDs a year.
But Starbucks is in a cutting mood, with hundreds of failed initiatives of recent years to cut away, so Hear Music has to go too. According to Starbucks, they are cutting back on display space for music to create a more focused customer experience — basically, they don’t want their customers to forget to buy coffee. One report says that each Starbucks store will display only 4 CDs.
Instead of CDs, Starbucks’ new emphasis in selling music will be its deal with iTunes Store to sell music over in-store networks provided by AT&T.
The new John Mellencamp album Life Death Love and Freedom may be the last Hear Music release. The fate of a dozen or more pending releases is uncertain at this point.
Starbucks full list of store closings: http://www.starbucks.com/aboutus/pressdesc.asp?id=882; Hear Music Summertime Sale (while supplies last) (Flash): http://www.hearmusic.com.
(2008-07-19)
IPhone 3G is out today at Apple stores and AT&T stores in the United States and in dozens of countries around the world.
The cellular phone is available only in stores. Apple did away with online sales for the 3G model after discovering that many people were buying their phones to resell or were reprogramming them to work on networks other than the one or two cellular networks that it officially supports (depending on the country). This time, you cannot buy an iPhone without taking the 15 minutes to sign up for the two-year service agreement ($1,680 in the United States, more in Canada, less in most other countries).
Lines were said to be shorter in New York City than at the original iPhone release a year ago but longer in Pennsylvania and other places we checked. There were long lines in Tokyo and Singapore, some of the earliest places to open. Rumors of shortages caused lines to form overnight in Australia.
The lines in the United Kingdom were not so long, but the launch was slowed by delays in cellular provider O2’s back-end system, which crashed this morning because of the high demand. It took O2’s IT staff over two hours to get the servers running normally. In the meantime, thousands of customers who had hoped to pick up a phone before work went away disappointed.
Lines are moving slowly at various places in the world because of difficulty in the new activation process for the phones. At U.S. stores, many customers were sent away with inactive phones. Customers can hope to activate the phones at home after the iTunes server farm recovers somewhat.
The iPhone 3G launch in Canada has been marred by cellular provider Rogers’s vague statements about pricing. A consumer petition has been circulating to protest reports of high prices for very limited cellular service. Last week there were reports that Apple was allocating just 10 iPhones per store in Canada, but so far there are no reports of shortages at Rogers stores. To deflect criticism, Rogers lowered the price of one low-end plan for a promotional period that runs through August. Rogers is the only Canadian network with the capacity to support the iPhone 3G, and it required a three-year contract typically at C$70 monthly. Despite the controversy over the pricing, there were lines overnight for the selected Rogers stores that opened two hours early this morning for the launch.
A new version of iTunes shipped yesterday to support iTunes Store’s new iPhone application category. Many iPhone applications associated with specific web services are free; most others sell for $9.99, a bargain compared to the traditional price of a computer application.
With the new iTunes came new iPhone software which allows the new iPhone applications to run on the original iPhone and iPod Touch.
(2008-07-11)
Pioneer says it is making a 16-layer optical disk with a capacity of 400 gigabytes (GB).
The announcement came in a press release this morning.
The new disk looks just like a DVD or Blu-ray (BD), and like a Blu-ray, packs 25 GB in each layer, an innovation made possible by the use of blue lasers. The difference in the new Pioneer disk is the number of layers. With 16 blue-laser layers, the new disk can hold 16 times as much data.
Pioneer says its new device can read so many layers because of signal-processing enhancements that allow it to more accurately separate the layers.
The new Pioneer disk is otherwise the same as Blu-ray, so Pioneer hopes to be able to make players that can play both its new disk format and Blu-ray.
The biggest challenge for the new high-capacity format could be finding digital products big enough to need the extra capacity. If one Blu-ray holds three seasons of a television series, will one 400 GB disk hold 48 seasons? One way or another, expanding the capacity of the familiar 12-centimeter optical disk should help keep the idea of a physical digital product relevant.
Pioneer says it will present more details of its new technology next week.
(2008-07-07)
It’s about time for a new Night Ranger album, and Hole in the Sun is in stores today. Bassist Jack Blades promises fans will “recognize our dual blazing guitars and vocals, and big choruses and melodic verses” on the new record, which comes 25 years after the band formed. Night Ranger is touring the central United States all summer.
The Yes summer tour is canceled after singer Jon Anderson’s recent hospitalization for asthma.
Relatively few loopholes remain for those who want to buy a fully functional computer running Microsoft Windows after Microsoft yesterday officially dropped Microsoft Windows XP. Still no word on a replacement. The move comes just after the retirement of Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Four months after surprising the world with functional Mac-compatible computers, Psystar is selling a range of bare-bones Mac-compatible systems priced from $300 to $2000.
The second-generation Apple iPhone, shipping in quantity in mid-July, costs more than the original because it requires a more expensive 2-year plan from AT&T. But the big plus is that it can run add-on applications. Competing cell phone makers who initially dismissed Apple’s pricey entrant in the cell phone market have sounded more worried in recent months despite Apple’s modest sales numbers to date.
There are now more than 1 billion computers in use worldwide according to the industry analysts at Gartner.
Yahoo apparently decided it can’t compete with Google — on domain names, that is. New higher fees ($35 a year and up), starting today, will likely deter most customers from registering or renewing domains at Yahoo.
Madonna’s new higher ticket prices ensure that everyone who really wants to see the new tour can get in. Only about half the shows sold out instantly when tickets went on sale.
Fjordstone’s 21st-century rebranding got a kick-start last week with a redesigned web site.
Night Ranger: http://www.nightranger.com; Fjordstone: http://www.fjordstone.com; Yes: http://www.yesworld.com.
(2008-07-01)
Did you know that Ikea, the giant furniture chain, is Swedish? To reinforce the point for those who might have forgotten, Ikea is hosting karaoke to tie in with the new movie of Mamma Mia.
Mamma Mia might be a Hollywood movie with a title in Italian, but the music is Swedish. It’s a story written around a set of songs that come from the legendary Swedish band Abba. Ikea customers who participate in the karaoke will be singing Abba songs from the movie. And they’ll win tickets to a private screening of the movie.
The Ikea Mamma Mia karaoke promotion ends July 12, a week before the July 18 movie opening. Check your local Ikea store calendar to find out when you can take the karaoke microphone and sing Abba songs.
Ikea USA: http://www.ikea.com/us/en/.
(2008-06-27)
Verizon this morning cut its ties to one of the oldest parts of the Internet. It’s part of a move by three of the largest U.S. internet service providers (ISPs) to cut their bandwidth costs by dropping Usenet from their Internet offerings.
The move, though a long time in coming, was precipitated by the New York State Attorney General’s office, which did a six-month data mining operation and concluded that child pornography was pervasive on the Internet, claiming to find indications of it in nearly 1 in every 300 newsgroups on Usenet.
The attorney general’s conclusions seem unlikely, as no individual Internet user has come forward to verify the presence of child pornography in any newsgroup. On the other hand, perhaps the lack of complaints is to be expected, as an individual user who files a child pornography complaint risks being prosecuted merely for discovering such material.
Not wanting to be bothered with the details of the problem, Verizon removed most newsgroups from its Usenet servers, keeping one eighth of them that encompass a small fraction of Usenet activity. The groups that remain are generally those that date back to the 1980s.
Sprint is cutting back a little less than Verizon, but is still removing more than half of newsgroups.
Time Warner Cable is shutting off Usenet entirely.
Traditionally, each Usenet host decides individually what newsgroups to carry.
The claim of child pornography, even when none is present, became a favorite tactic of censors during the Reagan administration, and so many are seeing the recent moves as an attempt to shut down legitimate communications on the Internet. Yet even if that is the attorney general’s intentions, others say, the ISPs’ moves are intended merely to cut costs.
California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger last week encouraged ISPs in that state to take similar actions, suggesting in a letter to ISPs that the First Amendment does not protect Usenet, and hinting at legal action against ISPs that continue to host newsgroups.
(2008-06-24)
Mozilla released version 3.0 of its industry-leading Firefox browser yesterday with the hope of setting a world record for the most downloads in 24 hours.
In 24 hours, 8.3 million users downloaded Firefox 3.0 from the Mozilla servers. Mozilla submitted the results to Guinness and is hoping to have a world record certified.
Firefox has been downloaded around 600 million times since its initial launch, so the Firefox 3.0 launch was a month’s worth of downloads in one day. Mozilla’s servers were not entirely prepared for the initial rush.
The U.S. launch was delayed by over an hour and there were numerous glitches in the first three hours of downloads as over 200 users per second attempted to download the program. But soon enough, the demand fell below 150 downloads per second and everything went smoothly from there on out. Users with high-speed connections reported completing the download in about 30 seconds.
Mozilla: http://www.mozilla.com.
(2008-06-18)
Despite the serial number, the new Chicago album is not really new.
Chicago XXXII, also known as “Stone Of Sisyphus,” was recorded 15 years ago. The album’s biting, experimental, horn-oriented sound cost the band their major-label record deal, as Warner Bros. had been hoping for an album of pop electric piano ballads.
The album is out today on Rhino Records.
Chicago: http://www.chicagotheband.com.
(2008-06-17)
Sparks played their 20 albums to date as 20 concerts at Islington Carling Academy, a popular nightclub in London, from Sparks/Halfnelson three weeks ago to Hello Young Lovers last night.
The “Sparks 21X21” series culminates across town at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire with a show debuting the songs of the new album Exotic Creatures of the Deep.
Sparks: http://www.allsparks.com.
(2008-06-12)
The United Kingdom’s favorite classic rock radio station will not have to shut down.
Planet Rock was endangered by financial troubles at its parent company and had been set to shut down March 31 if a buyer could not be found. That deadline was extended several times in order to put together the deal that has Malcolm Bluemel and a consortium of radio fans, which includes some noted rock musicians, buying the station.
The deal took place June 4, with “no break in transmission or changes in programming,” according to a statement on the radio stations’s web site.
Planet Rock: http://www.planetrock.co.uk.
(2008-06-11)
Tori Amos is relaunching her career as an independent artist after splitting with Epic Records.
In a statement on her new web site, she says, “Artists need not fear structure, we just have to design and partner with expansive ideas. It is time for us as artists to stop being dependent, dependent on any system that has become undependable. Only then can we help to create a new system that propagates and secures independence for each creator.”
Tori’s last album for Epic was American Doll Posse, released last year. Before signing with Epic, Tori recorded for Atlantic Records from 1992 to 2001.
Tori Amos: http://www.toriamos.com.
(2008-06-05)
In his new album Circus Money, out this month, Walter Becker puts the emphasis on the precision recording and sarcasm that made him famous as a founder of Steely Dan.
The folks at Wal-Mart must have decided they like three-disk sets. The new exclusive Journey set, out June 3, includes a regular studio album on one CD, 11 rerecorded hits on a second CD, and a concert movie on a DVD. A week later, the Wal-Mart exclusive on the Genesis tour video When in Rome 2007 has the complete June 14 concert with extras on 2 DVDs and a tour documentary, “Come Rain or Shine,” on a third DVD.
If you just want to hear Genesis’ greatest hits, pick up a copy of The Mail today. The paper contains a CD with 12 Genesis hits, along with a full-page exclusive interview with the band. But you have to be in the U.K. or Ireland to get the CD — we hear it wasn’t included in the copies of the paper that are sent overseas.
The Wal-Mart exclusive on the new Eagles album has expired, and now Amazon is touting its own exclusive download edition of Long Road Out of Eden, with the bonus track “Hole in the World.”
AC-DC is overdue for a new album, and one is coming soon, according to their web site: “The band is currently recording in Vancouver with producer Brendan O’Brien and long time audio engineer Mike Fraser.”
It’s tough to launch a new high-end video format during a recession, so Blu-Ray movies are getting steep discounts. When we checked around, we found most of them selling for around half of list price. Most Blu-Ray movies are packaged with a characteristic blue stripe so you won’t mistakenly try to play them in your DVD player. Blu-Ray hardware prices are holding steady, so widespread adoption of Blu-Ray will have to wait at least another year.
Aerosmith members are using their time between tours to get put back together physically. Guitarist Joe Perry had knee-replacement surgery, and singer Steven Tyler is going through a painful series of surgeries and physical therapy to correct long-term injuries to his feet, injuries that he says were caused by repetitive stress from his high-energy stage performance.
With so many live performances, one wonders how Howard Jones can find time to record a studio album. The latest word is that the new album may be out before the end of the year.
Walter Becker: http://www.walterbecker.com; Journey: http://www.journeymusic.com; Genesis: http://www.genesis-music.com; AC-DC: http://www.acdcrocks.com; Aerosmith: http://www.aerosmith.com; Howard Jones: http://www.howardjones.com.
(2008-06-01)
The Borders bookstore chain is selling books online again.
Borders was clearly in over its head in its previous attempt at an online store, which closed 7 years ago. The new online store at Borders.com is a much simpler operation designed to mimic the relaxing feeling of a neighborhood book store.
(2008-05-27)
CBS has announced the purchase of CNet, one of the oldest web groups with popular technology news and music download web sites.
The $1.8 billion deal, expected to close in less than 6 months, will more than double the size of CBS’s web presence.
CNet’s family of web sites includes News.com, Download.com, mp3.com, ZDNet, and MySimon. In addition to its content, CNet is considered a technology leader in content-oriented web delivery.
(2008-05-15)
Nine Inch Nails has become the first top-tier recording artist to give away an entire album. The Slip is available free at the Nine Inch Nails web site.
Unlike other album giveaways, such as the name-your-price deal on last year’s Radiohead album, The Slip is being given away in lossless formats — at full sound quality — and will not immediately be available for sale.
And this is not a case of an artist giving away second-rate work. Critics agree that The Slip is one of Nine Inch Nails’ best albums.
Nine Inch Nails: http://www.nin.com.
(2008-05-09)